It feels really good to be writing here again. For the past few months, LOD has languished in the Rubber Room while my attention has been preoccupied by the Dad 2.0 Summit, which starts a week from right now. There's still plenty to do, but now that the panels and speakers are set, I'm psyched to get back to the tyranny of the blank page. Besides, it's pretty damn disingenuous to preach "Content Is King" at the expense of my own.

And you know what? If I'm going to get back into the pool, I might as well do a cannonball off the high-dive and gear up for a monthlong blop. There's a lot of fun stuff planned for March: the Summit, of course; UVa is finally going back to March Madness; Shamrock Shakes; the Vernal Equinox. Plus, it's Frozen Food Month! Which must surely mean something to somebody.

We all know that personal blogs conjure a deceptive sense of intimacy with their writers. And yet, when a rock-star blogging couple in Utah splits up, readers go bananas because they feel betrayed. And they forget that even the blogs who come across with the rawest emotion aren't telling us everything.

I was thinking of this as I was running around the track at my gym. Have I mentioned I'm training for a 5K? I may not have, because training to run three miles sounds lame, considering how many of my online friends can run a marathon and get all their shopping done before breakfast.

The only difference in my running routine is I've left the treadmill, which I love, for the running track, which sucks. The treadmill is cushioned, and parked in front of a TV, and I can watch all the machine's numbers advance and extrapolate data in my head to pass the time. Making actual progress on a horizontal surface is dull, and polluted with other people, and makes my knees pulse like a beating heart.

I was jogging on the outer ring of the track when I came across an older couple, presumably on their constitutional stroll. He was laboring a bit, perhaps recovering from a recent injury, and she was shuffling along beside him, holding his hand. As I neared them from behind, I saw them gesturing with their free hands, and they often turned to each other and smiled.

And I thought, that's the goal, isn't it? To find a companion you can grow old(er) with, who still engages you in conversation long after most couples have run out of things to say. Who'll support your weight when you're limping, and will accept your help when she needs it. Good for you, Older Walking Couple. I'm enamored of you. You're delightful.

When I caught up to them, I heard the woman say, "I don't get why she's still with that cocksucker."

Then the man launched a really loud belch that bounced around the basketball court below.

When we read blogs, we like to delude ourselves that we're really getting to know their writers. And we are, to the extent the writers are letting us. But no matter how perfect you think something is from far away, it's only when you get really close up that you smell the burpwaft.

OK, folks. I have to come clean. I feel like a schmuck for even bothering to write my last post, wherein I blathered about hunkering down for a week of the purest form of single fatherhood, with my kids' mother halfway around the world. Because you want to know the truth?

"Ardu-Week" was a doddle.

Sure, it began inauspiciously, when Robert poked me awake Saturday morning with ""Dad, I think I sort of accidentally clogged the toilet," and I spent several disoriented, pre-coffee minutes fetching loaves of TP out of the bowl. And after we left Robert with Grandma Jellyspoon to prepare for their train ride, TwoBert was genuinely distraught over not seeing his brother for a week. Before he fell asleep in the car, he sobbed, "Daddy, who will I fight with?"

(Whom, goddammit. What are they teaching first-graders nowadays?)

(When future anthropologists study the fall of American hegemony, they will determine that object pronouns were the tipping point. You watch.)

But it didn't take long for the two of us to find our rhythm. During the day, TwoBert attended a day camp, where he made catapults and paper and masks and his own newspaper and vanilla-ice-cream-in-a-bag, and played tag and sledded and splashed in enormous, filthy puddles and fell back in love with Uno and learned all sorts of interesting things, like "UNGULATES MEANS YOU HAVE HOOVES, DADDY!"

In the afternoon, drunk with cinematic autonomy, he aired the first annual TwoBert Afternoon Film Festival, featuring a red carpet of Reepicheep, Chewbacca, and Shaun the Sheep. But the real joy was watching the brothers Skype with each other, seeing their eyes light up when their images came on, and then watching it all devolve into fart noises and insults. Robert notably IM'ed, "I miss you like I miss restroom bacteria." And TwoBert responded by burping with his mouth an inch from the camera.

The best thing about TwoBert is that, at six years old, he is truly six. Robert was 6 when he was 4, and now that he's almost 10, he's really 47. TwoBert is just coming into his own as a reader, and each night, after we read together, we'd have our Separate Reading Time, where he'd sound out "Get Fuzzy" cartoons and I would prop "The Hunger Games" in front of me while he sounded out "Get Fuzzy" cartoons.

It was a weird week for TwoBert, with no mom, no brother, no school, and a daily camp full of strangers. And when Robert stormed into my house yesterday afternoon, they attacked each other like puppies who'd been kenneled all week, each ecstatic that he had his fighting partner back.

This week has been a wildfire on the horizon since last fall. We all knew it was coming. We planned for it, taped up the windows, loaded up on canned, nonperishable food. And now, it's here.

Both sons are off school, my ex-wife is in India, and the Dad 2.0 Summit begins in 18 days.

Welcome to ArduWeek.

I won't sit here, in this chair I so seldom leave, and tell you this week will be as nuts as it could have been. Because it won't. I'll admit that, when Moxie told me she was going to Delhi during this week, this week of all weeks, the week when my kids would gleefully spend all their gloriously free time arguing who can make the loudest fart noise with the crook of his elbow, I indulged in a few Scooby-Dooble-takes. Every day I spend about four years on the phone. Verizon has called me twice and threatened: Upgrade or Die. And Niels Bohr once proved that conference calls and free-range children are an inherent physical paradox; I knew that a week on my own would be a Schrödinger's catastrophe.

Enter: Grandma Jellyspoon.

On Monday, she and Robert will train westward to see family, who, I hear, will take him ice-fishing. We also found a day camp for TwoBert that 1) involves lots of outdoor ruggedry, 2) is remarkably affordable, and 3) didn't sell out three years ago.

There's been a lot going on, as always. TwoBert is learning to skate. Robert is writing graphic novels. And both competed in the Pinewood Derby. I really need to write about all this soon, before the details fade from my overtaxed brain. The good news is I have a stockpile of stuff to write about once I get the chance to take it up again in earnest.

This week, we'll see what happens. I'll be a single dad wrangling a single child and thinking a lot about single malt.

Here in Ann Arbor, it's a lot easier to get involved in pickup basketball at the gym. In New York, there's always 800 people waiting for a court, and they're either really tall and fast and skilled, or they'll elbow you in the nuts for a rebound. Here, you can usually find a good game, with regular-sized, courteous humans, and you don't have to wait long for it.

Yesterday I got to the gym and started shooting hoops. I love shooting hoops, because that's always where I've done my best thinking. I've been doing that since I was seven years old, at my grandparents' house across the street, just shooting and thinking. It's one of my favorite ways to spend Alone Time.

At the other basket, a bunch of younger guys were playing 3-0n-3. And I noticed that 1) they were each younger than I by probably 20 years, and 2) there were really terrible. They were chucking airballs, dribbling off their feet, colliding with each other unnecessarily. And calling ridiculous fouls. But they were playing, after all. They were active Americans who were not obesely waddling to the fridge and back, and for that they should be saluted.

A little while later, one of them had to leave, and another saw me at the other end of the court and asked me to fill in. And I told them No, because I didn't really feel like it. This is my Alone Time. I'm older than you, and this is what older people do. I'm gathering these things called "thoughts." Leave me alone.

I couldn't say that, of course, so I made up some lame excuse: I wasn't wearing my knee brace. Which is a total lie, because I've never needed a knee brace. And that might have been all there was to it, until he fired off the coup de grâce:

"C'mon, Pops. We need a sixth."

I stood there, processing what this little snot had just said to me, my toes curling in my shoes.

Movember 2011 is over, and moustaches are dropping off lips all over the world, to the delight of irritated spouses and frightened children. It's been an amazing month for the Dad 2.0/Man of the House/NYC Dads Group/DadCentric /DadLabs team, which over those 30 days raised just over $19,000 (and irritated a lot of spouses and frightened a lot of children).

But were we done? Bah, I say.

Right as Movember was starting, Kristen Chase forwarded me an e-mail from a firm representing Philips Norelco. And over the next couple of weeks, PN had heaped another $15,000 onto the pile, and the Stachetacular Shave-Off was born. Which just goes to show: it's not what you know, but with whom you've been kicked out of a karaoke bar for bootlegging vodka.

Below is my contribution, which, if I had any editing skills, would be about a minute shorter:

If you're interested in owning or gifting a SensoTouch 3D, PN is offering a $30 rebate here.

Thank you, Philips Norelco. For the donation, for the shavers, and for amplifying the opportunity for Social Dads to do a lot of Social Good.

Have you seen? When Babble launched a slew of dad-based content, dad blogging got a huge kick in the ass. And when Disney came along and bought the whole shebang-a-bang, that kick just got super-charged from a large, ovoid yellow foot. Suddenly, I'm co-employees with John Lasseter and Erin Andrews AND Iron Man AND Kermit the Frog, and thinking that would be one helluva poker game.

My most recent post for Babble is this one about how much more useful dad blogs are than say, laddie mags that measure your worth by your golf handicap or tolerance for Jagermeister. Real adult men iving their real adult lives need to tell their stories, and it makes me happy to know that, somewhere in the vast murine galaxy, there is a little star populated by dad bloggers who suddenly write from the most powerful media platform we've ever enjoyed.

(It's as manly a piece as I've ever written, I suppose, given its SEO-friendly webtag that also happens to be the title of this post.)

And speaking of powerful platforms, I want to thank all of you who have contributed to the Movember Dadblogging Team co-titled by the Dad 2.0 Summit, Man of the House, the NYC Dads Group, DadCentric, and DadLabs. Thanks to your enthusiasm, we reached the $12,000 mark just a few hours ago. It does my heart good to know that so many people can come together to use Social Media for Social Good in such a meaningful way--and stick it to those punks on Team Austin, who've got 52 more guys than we do and are still eating our exhaust.

Recently, while Robert and his mom were in Chicago running a 5K (and checking out C.S. Lewis's original, real-life wardrobe, thus carefully cultivating our boy's nerdery), TwoBert and I had a good bit of one-on-one time. TwoBert loves these opportunities, because although he loves his brother, he also loves not having him around to constantly beat on him.

On the first night, while we were figuring out how we'd spend our Saturday, he and I read "The Gingerbread Man" together. And he came away enthralled by the ideas that 1) you could cook something in search of companionship, and 2) that something could end up such an impudent little shit. So he asked, "Dad, can we make gingerbread cookies?"

"Hell yes!" I said. Because cooking with kids is a blast, especially now that my kitchen is larger than a pay toilet.

Over the past week, I've benefited from some favorable press. On Monday, my new friend Lisa Duggan featured me on The Parent du Jour, where I shockfully reveal that I no longer have sex with my kids' mother. I met Lisa at the New Parents Expo last weekend, and predictably, she is good people. Especially because she likes to titter at terms like "12-15 inches of erogenous tissue." And presumably, at "titter."

The other momentous news is that Babble.com, arbiter of Most Things Motherly, published its list of the Top 50 Dad Bloggers. I'm proud to wear No. 6, because the list was compiled by my peers, long before I started spume-surfing. There's a lot of great individual fatherly talent there, even though old-schoolers Daddy Types and Pet Cobra were somehow overlooked.

I'm also happy to be looking up at Polly Pagenhart, who, dad blogger or Twitter mom, is just a great writer and person.

If you're visiting here for the first time from either of these sites, I'm glad you're here. I will be using this slightly larger sphere of influence to talk about ... gonads.

As I am smack in the middle of my Deadwood DVDs, I've become a little obsessive over the greatness of Al Swearengen. (So much so, in fact, that I'll be growing a Swearengen Stache as part of our ever-burgeoning Movember dadblogger team.)

I like watching DVDs because I'm a dork for the commentary, especially when it comes from the perspective of the series creator. In this case, David Milch was annotating a scene in which Swearengen is being treated for what the Doc expects are kidney stones. And since this is the 187os, the "treatment" involves probing for the stones by sticking a metal spike into Al's urethra. As you might imagine, Al spends most of this scene held down by three other guys and screaming his head off in agony, within earshot of just about everyone in the camp. One by one, the characters turn to react to the cries of "MOTHER OF GOD!" and other things that only premium cable stations can broadcast. And Milch says he wrote the scene to stress the "unity" in "community":

"Our fundamental identity isn't individual. It's collective. The sense of ourselves as separate is the real illusion. We find our best nature when we experience ourselves as part of some larger single organism."

The parallels with Movember are striking, not least because the mutual subject matter is Maladies of the Man-Groin.

A lot of men are sacrificing greatly for this effort, risking ridicule from significant others, professional colleagues, and/or the more hirsutely blessed. And we are attempting to act together, as a collective, so that we might all stand to gain a greater standing among the parent blogosphere. We might even help debunk this preposterous idea that somehow "it takes a mom" to achieve Social Media for Social Good.

As a free-lance writer in a new town, where I can go an entire day without a single personal interaction, I find it's important to write down the stuff I manage to accomplish. It's good for reminding me there are other reasons to get up in the morning besides watching Deadwood DVDs. (Such a great show. And I think we can all be grateful the name was trademarked before someone co-opted it for an ED treatment.)

Over at The Turbid Spume, I used the voices of four other men (including Ty Webb!) to add to the ever-burgeoning chorus of dads who are underwhelmed by their portrayals in TV shows and advertisements. Brands might be trying to market to dads the right way, but it's up to us to speak out and show them the images to which we'll respond favorably.

Tomorrow, I'm headed back to New York to speak on a panel headed by the NYC Dads Group at the New Parents Expo. We'll be talking about fatherhood and such at 10:45 Saturday morning and manning the Dads' Lounge all day. It will also be my first "visit" to the city since college, which is a little freaky. But it will be great to see faces that I've known for more than six weeks.

I am also committed to packing everything for this trip in my backpack. Because I WILL DEFEAT YOU, BAGGAGE FEES.

And mostly most importantly, I'm very proud to announce that the Movember page for this year's Dad 2.0/Man of the House team is up and running. You may remember I took part in this last year, and this time around I'm hoping to gather dadbloggers into one Hirsute Scrum of Awesome that will hopefully 1) raise a hill of cash, and 2) help energize more online dads to get involved with Social Media for Social Good.

So far, around 30 men have agreed to join the team, and we have more than two weeks to recruit as many willing philtrums as possible. If you'd like to join us, please register here and join the DAD 2.0/MAN OF THE HOUSE team. Every lip counts.

And if you'd like to donate to us, promote us, or just give us a good-on-ya punch in the arm, we'll take that, too.

Since I'm all up in this Deadwood headspace, I'm thinking I'll be growing a full Swearengen. And if we reach a certain money threshold, I'll dye it to match the prostate cancer ribbon. So more A2 parents can 1) meet me, and 2) tell their kids to cross the street when they see me coming.